Tigranes

Again, we don' t know if hotseat co-op is the only MP available, or if there are other types where you do create your character and play with other people - in my mind I don't see why we wouldn't have it, but we'll have to wait and see.

As I posted just yesterday: The main reason I am not sold on DA2 yet is because I haven't heard encouraging things about combat and I want to see that is solid. For me DAO was a good old dungeon romp dressed up in a passable fantasy setting, without the fun combat it would have been hardly worth playing. So I'm on the fence. Anyway, as I say, all this crusade against criticism is really quite silly. Of course you want to be fair to Bioware and you want to see fair criticisms, but all this "shut up if you are likely to buy it" is rubbish. A game is composed of a lot of different elements, it's a package. If I buy DA2 in the end does that mean I support the ridiculous "romance" **** and can't complain about how it's getting closer and closer towards those soft-porn romance fiction paperbacks? I agree in princiiple that pre-ordering a game that you're not sure about is pretty silly because (a) in most cases you don't need to to ensure you buy it, (b) it really does send the wrongest message possible to the publisher - that their hype is hyping you up.

Classic tactic of touching up photos of serial killers to make them look crazier, uglier, less humane. I don't know if his eyebrows were shaved off already, but give the man a suit, natural lighting a bit of touch up and he'll look just like many other Ugly But Perfectly Fine Members Of Society. It's good that we are so eager to judge and mock others on appearance when it's safe to do so, though.

If New Zealand ever needed more immigrant students to raise the national income, they should just collect Shryke's posts into a book. Come to New Zealand!

Not worth bothering, Volo has this unshakeable belief that all of us are part of the Hypocrit Hivemind and will buy every single BIO game and secretly love it. The threads here make it clear for anybody else that most people are on the fence, and quite a lot in fact want to like the game (cause, y'know, a fun game is better than a not-fun game) but aren't seeing enough yet. All this anti-negativity is pretty boring. Criticism (and praise) of Bio will change when Bio changes.

I'd love to see one actually, I'm curious about ROT and might even get it if it looks fun.

Those breasts are disgusting, by the way, we're people not cows. (Also let's not get NSFW...)

Are you serious? Play the NWN1 vanilla OC? I'd rather play with my cat, that **** is so bad it is offensive. HOTU was a good campaign and SOU wasn't bad either - I just don't think it's worth going back to when combined with NWN1, which is more cumbersome to play than, say, the Infinity Engine. Kind of similar to how I'd have played NWN2/motb/soz more if it was on a different engine.

I still have my nwn/hotu I think, but I'm actually not a big fan of HOTU. I'm still mulling it over... I'm always satisfied with any opportunity for some friendly fire fireballs.

You don't need to look very hard anymore.

Just don't change LadyCrimson.

I tried it at 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2, but each time (a) the economic system was broken in some way, e.g. market crash in late-game or perpetually bankrupt capitalists, (b) big nations never seemed to get into big fights which meant Britain would reign supreme. I believe (b) was somewhat rectified with 1.2 but I don't know - although I loved EU2, increasingly, it feels like Paradox is cashing in making the same game in 7 different guises, and I'm starting to get tired of putting in so much time on their games only to let some part of the simulation let me down. I'd hoped Paradox would work on redeveloping their basic systems and making a new generation of historical sims, but it seems like their plan is to just keep doing the same thing and making 4 expansion packs for one game and so on.

I'm sure it is, but the cell size has surely changed since the Gamebryo TES.

Kind of at a void now. 150 hours of FNV then a playthrough of FO2. From the GOG sale, Realms of Arkania 1 is not impressing me at the moment (nice game, but nothing special), Age of Wonders was not bad but a bit laborious with endless waves of enemy armies. I might go on to Arx Fatalis. Still waiting for Victoria 2 to fix itself after 6 months, and haven't been convinced enough to buy Two Worlds 2...

Oh yes, it'd be nice if we keep the LP spirit going. I'm entering a pretty relaxed period now (touch wood), so I might do another LP... but I don't have TOEE, so can't take up this one.

I can't remember 95% of FO3 now, but it seems to be that they're quite similar. NV definitely has a few locations where there's hardly anything of note to find (e.g. some of the shacks), but that's fine with me - it actually adds to the feeling of the Wasteland in general, where not everywhere is going to be preserved in the same manner and not everything has living inhabitants. I do recall that FO3 did a nice job of spreading around various environmental clues as to what happened, but NV does a lot of it too, e.g. the Vaults. What I thought NV did really well was the world design as a whole - combined with the location markers (which aren't so bad, as opposed to quest markers), roads, people pointing you the right way, the terrain, the critter distribution - everything was organically and sensibly designed to encourage you to explore in places where you will find interesting things, and nearly every place in the world had that "hey what's over there" thing going on. I think FO3 did pretty well at this too, but to be honest I only remember the idiotic subways. Subways, subways, subways, ghouls, mutants, subways. Skyrim map seems to show several major settlements, which is always nice.

You think it's not a widespread development? A toddler as part of a pageant. Thongs for 10 year olds, decorations say "wink wink" and "eye candy". Needs no explanation.

This is actually a very interesting question - in D&D I believe elves are meant to have a slower growth rate roughly proportionate to how much longer their average lifespan is, so that they can spend at least 50-60 years as a child. I think from memory, in Tolkien lore it was a bit weirder since elves were practically immortal. But then in most fantasy lore these longer lived races are also known for their almost fatally low birthrate, and genetically built in complications towards humanlike mating, no? Anyway, Thornton I have no idea how you can not notice the breasts, they stand out as hideously as if she had six arms. Funny thing is, there are a lot of things about DA2 that I like, or think that I'll like - I find their basic premise very compelling and reasonably original (I mean, we're going from "Orcs are coming, let's larp LOTR and copy&paste their battle sequences" to "how did this refugee become a powerful figure"), the crisper art direction is nice even if too animefied, combat changes look good too even if they compromised too much on the tactical combat, etc, they've definitely expanded on the number of animations, and I'm excited that they're trying something new with the retelling narrative style. When I count it like that it's kind of puzzling to see just how the hype has managed to break down all those good points by showing weird things like Girl With Giant Boob Disease and talking about Cool **** Happens When You Press A Button. Still wait and see. Probably gonna have to see if people here try it and judge (a) the combat, and (b) the actual C&C.

sorophyx the developers get advances and then a % royalty cut based on their specific contract. The article mentions that the latter is often dependent upon metacritic scores & copies sold, but says nothing about how the advances are determined. There is no 10% figure. It would vary a lot, anyway. What the article IS saying is that in some cases (i.e. when a game doesn't sell too well), zero of the actual sales revenue might make it to the devs (even if they were paid beforehand). I'd imagine that that was what happened to Alpha Protocol, for instance, while for FNV Obsidian would have got a generous bonus from Zenimax (unless they shafted themselves on the contract).

There were some silly invisible walls in NV that made you hop around like a goat (exacerbated by the retarded gamebryo jumping) but it was really a minor issue. The central mountain ranges were crisscrossed by so many different paths - Primm Pass, Black Mountain, the radscorpion valley, hidden valley route - and other big mountains also had lots of thoroughfares like the area north of Goodsprings.

The article doesnt' state how the advances are calculated (and they vary by the contract). I don't think the 10% figure is ever connected to that, either. What it does make clear is how the numbers break down on the publishing/distribution/marketing side of things, and once again stress how Metacritic has become, simply by the virtue of crunching a few numbers, become such an important tool in this entire cycle of funding and evaluation. Everyone knows it's broken in so many ways (even "casual" gamers with no knowledge of the industry often know not to blindly trust reviews), but it's the easiest and the only viable model to base the money flow on.

Not sure what you mean about same avatar on MP - I guess you mean on hotseat coop. We don't really know how that will work yet (will it be your character teleporting into the right place, or you never really own the character?), we will see. Anyway, now I know what vid you mean, as you can see it's a live presentation with live narrators, not a digitally distributed trailer - that's what you tend to get in live presentations, not pre-recorded blockbuster style narrations and such. It also seems as if they're very much focused on showing you live gameplay (loading up the game and clicking load, literally) rather than CGI or scripted segments. I'd much rather see a player standing around on a cliff rather than anything specially made up for hype. (Of course, if your game is Assassin's Creed, then you can do the swoopy camera thing, I guess.)

Meh. Apparently we all love blockbuster movies and we all want to play blockbuster movies in the guise of games. It makes a lot of sense. Sooner or later we'll get a character whose entire script is made up of quotations.

Having read up a little more about Radiant Storytelling, actually, it sounds a lot, lot less impressive. Firstly; Seriously, class-specific quests & people remembering your past misdeeds? I foresee at least ten gaming journos cry tears of joy about how this is the next big thing in RPGs and Bethesda is going WHERE NONE HAVE GONE BEFORE. Guess we'll have to wait and see whether all this actually delivers any substantial improvement. Secondly; The last bit (which wasn't quoted in this thread before) sets off alarm bells. About a thousand of them. Will you have the farmer's kidnapped shovel being guarded by rats or gold dragons? To be fair, some other stuff does sound great. Running backwards is slower now to prevent kiting, betterd third person view, etc.

"You killed my father and took all of our stuff!" "Yeah, sorry about that." "Anyway, is there anything else you wanted to talk about?" "Do you have any work for me?"